Bronze age pastoralism and differentiated landscapes along the inner Asian Mountain Corridor

This chapter explores the emergence of pastoralism in the eastern regions of the Eurasian steppe (Figure 15.1) from the 4th to the 2nd millennia BC. At the intersection with the Altai Mountains of southwest Siberia, the vast expanse of the Eurasian steppe region extends south along the piedmont hills across the Dzhungar Mountains to the Tian Shan and then along the northwestern slopes of the Pamir Mountains and Hindu Kush. Historians and archaeologists have recognized economic and social links among agrarian civilizations of the Indus Valley, southern Central Asia, and the oases of Bactria and Margiana. Yet, prehistoric societies of the Inner Asian high mountains and the Eurasian steppe were not clearly connected with the “core” processes of economic and social development until the late 2nd millennium BC-the division between “the steppe and the sown.” Recent decades of research in Central Eurasia have recast this division and enticed us to explore connections that may have linked mountain/steppe pastoralists to far wider networks of exchange thousands of years before the confluence of China and Southwest Asia shaped the fabled “Silk Routes.” Modeled after Possehl’s groundbreaking model for commodity exchange and interaction called the Middle Asian Interaction Sphere (MAIS; Possehl 2002, 2004), here we investigate the potential that analogous arenas of interaction helped to transform the domestic economy of Inner Asian mountain steppe communities in the late 4th and 3rd millennia BC.